A man shields a woman with his body during a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, where a gunman fired bullets into the crowd. David Becker / Getty As bullets rained down on a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday night, people stepped up to protect total strangers and the ones they love.

Tales of heroism have emerged in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, which left 59 people dead and more than 500 injured.

Jonathan Smith rushed about 30 people to safety and took a bullet in the neck.

After a gunman opened fire on the crowd, some were too frightened to move. A quick-thinking father, Johnathan Smith, began shouting, "Active shooter, active shooter, let's go!"

He told all nine members of his extended family at the concert, as well as nearby strangers, to join hands and run. They moved as a human chain toward a handicapped parking area and hid behind several rows of cars, Smith recalled in an interview with The Washington Post.

The 30-year-old copy machine repairmain spotted a few young girls who weren't fully covered. He stood up to warn them to get down. It was then that a bullet struck him in the neck.

A Washington Post reporter shared a photo of Smith on Twitter, and it has since gone viral.

"I don't see myself that way [as a hero]," he told The Washington Post. "I would want someone to do the same for me. No one deserves to lose a life coming to a country festival."

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Dawn-Marie Gray and Kevin Gray stayed behind to save others.

When Dawn-Marie Gray and her husband, Kevin, won tickets to the Route 91 Harvest festival through a Portland radio station, they could never have known it would be one of the most harrowing events of their lives. The couple took shelter in a VIP area during the shooting.

"When we came out it was horrific," Dawn-Marie told USA Today. "A field of bodies."

Dawn-Marie, who worked as a paramedic for about seven years, knew that local paramedics would not be admitted entry until the area was deemed safe. She and her husband turned to the wounded, providing CPR, making tourniquets, and checking for pulses on lifeless bodies.

The couple worked together to load victims into cars en route to the hospital.

"It had nothing to do with being a hero," Dawn-Marie said. "That's being a human being."

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Carly Krygier became a human shield to protect her four-year-old daughter.

Carly Krygier and daughter, Blayke.
Courtesy of Carly Krygier

Carly Krygier heard the words "Get down!" ring out at the festival and sprang into action.

"I put the baby on the ground and got on top of her," Krygier told CNN. "And when we heard a little break, we ran to the bleachers that were just behind us and I tried to tuck her in close to the end so she was as protected as possible." She saved her four-year-old daughter Blayke.

They both took refuge in the nearby Tropicana hotel.

"My heart is with all the families tonight who weren't as lucky as my daughter, my friends, and I," Krygier wrote in a Facebook post in the early hours of Monday morning.

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Rob Ledbetter, who served as a sniper in the Iraq War, tended to the wounded.

Concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, take cover after the shooting began.
Getty/David Becker

Like many concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest festival, Ledbetter heard the sound of popping and figured it was fireworks. When he saw people drop to the ground, his instincts kicked in.

"The echo, it sounded like it was coming from everywhere and you didn't know which way to run," Ledbetter, a 42-year-old US Army veteran, told ABC News.

Once he led his brother, who was shot and injured, and his wife to safety in a VIP area of the concert, Ledbetter turned his attention to the wounded. He told ABC News he compressed someone's shoulder injury, wrapped a leg, and put a makeshift tourniquet on a teenage girl.

"[To] some random guy, I said, 'I need your shirt,'" Ledbetter recalled, who is now a mortgage broker and a resident of Las Vegas. "He just gave me the flannel off his back."

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Lindsay Lee Padgett turned her truck into a makeshift ambulance.

Lindsay Lee Padgett and Mike Jay.
Courtesy of Lindsay Lee Padgett

Lindsay Lee Padgett was sitting in the passenger seat of her truck, watching people care for the injured, when a man approached her window.

"Right now, we need you truck," he said. "We just need to get people over to the hospital, OK?"

"OK, go ahead, put them all in the back," she responded.

Padgett and her fiance, Mike Jay, piled five wounded victims and five others who were caring for the injured into the back of the truck. One man who was shot in the back died.

"We were just trying to get people to the hospital. We got halfway there, and as we were getting on the freeway, we saw an ambulance stopped, so we went over and they started taking the most critical people and putting them in the ambulance," Padgett told ABC News.

The couple drove the other victims and their companions to the hospital.

Tom McIntosh, who was shot in the leg, reunited with his hero a few days after the shooting.

Tom McIntosh said he wouldn't have made it out of the festival alive if it weren't for a stranger who stopped to care for him. McIntosh lay bleeding from the leg in the bed of a pick-up truck.

James Lawson, who serves in the US Army Reserve, was fleeing the active-shooter scene when he passed by a truck and noticed that a tourniquet around McIntosh's leg was tied incorrectly.

""It was the completely wrong spot,'' Lawson told TODAY. "I walked up there and he was actively bleeding, so I adjusted the belt, got it up where it should be, tightened it down."

Lawson stayed with McIntosh, consoling him, until a different truck ferried them both to the hospital. A bullet is still lodged in McIntosh's leg, but he is expected to make a full recovery.

"There was dozens and dozens of other concertgoers doing the same thing,'' Lawson said of his heroic act. "They couldn't leave anybody behind, they were running back towards the fire to help more people. There's got to be hundreds of stories like this one."